The Hound of the Baskervilles: Mr. Sherlock Holmes

One morning Sherlock Holmes sat at the breakfast table, and I stood on the hearth-rug, holding the walking stick that a visitor had left behind the night before.It was a fine, heavy stick with a silver band just under the handle, and on the band were engraved the words: “To James Mortimer, from his friends of the C.C.H., 1884.”Holmes, sitting with his back to me, asked, “Well, Watson, what do you make of it?” and when I wondered how he knew what I was doing, he pointed to the polished silver coffee-pot in front of him.

I said that Dr. Mortimer must be an elderly, successful country doctor who did a great deal of walking, because the stick was so knocked about and its iron tip was worn down.I added that C.C.H. probably stood for a local hunt whose members the doctor had helped, and Holmes cried, “Excellent, Watson!”He even said that I might not be a genius myself, but I was a wonderful conductor of light, and I felt proud — until he added that most of my conclusions were wrong.

Holmes examined the stick through a magnifying glass and said that C.C.H. more likely meant Charing Cross Hospital, because a gift to a doctor is more likely to come from a hospital than from a hunt.The gift must have been given five years earlier, when the doctor left the hospital to work in the country, and since only well-established doctors held the hospital’s top jobs, he must have been only a young junior doctor.So the owner, Holmes announced, was not a grave, middle-aged man but a friendly, unambitious, absent-minded fellow under thirty, with a favourite dog that was bigger than a terrier and smaller than a mastiff.

I laughed, but I took down the Medical Directory and found that a James Mortimer had been a junior doctor at Charing Cross Hospital from 1882 to 1884 and now lived in Grimpen, on Dartmoor.“And the dog?” I asked, and Holmes explained that the marks of teeth in the middle of the stick showed the dog had carried it behind its master, and that the jaw was too broad for a terrier and too narrow for a mastiff: it was a spaniel with curly hair.Then he stopped at the window and said, “I can see the dog on our doorstep, and its owner is ringing the bell — this is the dramatic moment, Watson, when you hear a step on the stair that is walking into your life.”

Dr. Mortimer came in: a very tall, thin man with a long nose like a beak, keen grey eyes behind his glasses, and a slightly untidy coat.He ran to the stick with a cry of joy, said that he would not lose it for the world, and explained that his friends at Charing Cross Hospital had given it to him when he married.“Dear, dear, that’s bad!” said Holmes, because the doctor had spoiled one of his little deductions; yet the main points were right, for Mortimer had left the hospital to make a home in the country.

Dr. Mortimer said that he had come because he faced a most extraordinary problem and that Holmes was the second highest expert in Europe; when Holmes asked, a little sharply, who was the first, he named a French scientist, Bertillon.Holmes told him that he had better stop the compliments and explain plainly what the problem was, and so the strange case of the Hound of the Baskervilles began.